help directory_name

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Oct-2009, Marco Caliari wrote:

| Dear maintainers,
| 
| if your current working directory is, e.g., /home/caliari/analysis and you 
| type
| 
| help analysis
| 
| you should get the help text for Contents.m (if present). This does not 
| work in Octave 3.2.3
| 
| octave:1> help analysis
| error: help: `analysis' not found
| octave:1> pwd
| ans = /home/caliari/analysis
| octave:2> ls
| Contents.m
| 
| despite the function do_contents in help.m. It is not difficult to fix 
| this problem. But, there is another problem: if you type
| 
| help name
| 
| in Matlab, and name is more than once in your path, then you get the 
| help text for all the Contents.m therein. In Octave there is 
| find_dir_in_path. First of all, it does not find name in the current 
| working directory:
| 
| octave:1> pwd
| ans = /home/caliari/analysis
| octave:2> path
| 
| Octave's search path contains the following directories:
| 
| . 
| /usr/local/share/octave/3.2.3/m/statistics/base
| [CUT...]
| octave:3> find_dir_in_path ('analysis')
| ans =
| 
| and, if name is twice in your path, it finds only one
| 
| octave:1> find_dir_in_path('geometry')
| ans = /usr/local/share/octave/3.2.3/m/geometry
| octave:2> addpath('/home/caliari/geometry')
| octave:3> find_dir_in_path('geometry')
| ans = /home/caliari/geometry
| 
| I think that the right fix for help directory_name should be based on a 
| fix for find_dir_in_path (which I'm not able to do).

I checked in the following changeset.

  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/8e345f2fe4d6

jwe